Author: NCIJ NETWNCIJ NETWORK

The confirmation of Todd Blanche as attorney general of the United States reveals just how far President Donald Trump has shifted the Overton window—the spectrum of thought that is considered acceptable—with regard to the Department of Justice. During the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings last month, the acting attorney general’s nomination hit a snag when two senators, Tom Tillis and John Cornyn, demanded that Blanche sign a document assuring them he would not revive the president’s proposal to set up a $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund providing support for individuals allegedly persecuted by the federal government. Although he initially hesitated, Blanche…

The former Trump lawyer, who worked on the presidential immunity case and oversaw approval of the president’s disputed White House ballroom project, will replace David Warrington on September 1.Published On 10 Aug 202610 Aug 2026United States President Donald Trump has named White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf as his next White House counsel, elevating a longtime legal ally to one of the administration’s most important legal positions months before November’s midterm elections.The former Trump lawyer, who worked on the presidential immunity case and later oversaw approval of the president’s disputed White House ballroom project, will replace David Warrington on September…

For a population to remain stable over time without immigration, women must have an average of about 2.1 children. According to the latest Eurostat data, the European Union’s fertility rate — the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime — fell to 1.34 in 2024. In Spain, the lowest among the continent’s large countries, it was 1.1 and still declining.The United States is only slightly less exposed. Its fertility rate, long higher than Europe’s, has also dropped well below replacement level. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it fell to 1.6…

Click on a note with the pen, and it will open in edit mode with a configuration toolbar shown across the top. Here you can set up pen type, color, line thickness, and all the other tools you’d want to use to write or draw. I found the editing interface just about perfect in the sense that it balances keeping it simple but still giving you access to the controls you actually need.The other element I enjoyed in the Note A1 UI is the Inspiration Space. I can easily clip a bit of text from any document (including web pages),…

The first sign that quantum computing has broken modern cryptography probably won’t be a splashy theft of Satoshi Nakamoto’s dormant Bitcoin. It could just be a wave of unrelated crypto wallet breaches with no trace of how an attacker did it, according to the founder of blockchain startup Quantus. “When someone cracks your key, you don’t get a memo saying how they did it,” Christopher Smith, CEO and co-founder of Quantus Network, told Cointelegraph. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive a private key from public keys exposed onchain, allowing an attacker to move funds without compromising a wallet, device or…

The claim that the executive chairman of a contractor for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement attended the wedding of pop singer Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce is still under investigation.  The rumor stems from several news reports saying that Steven Demetriou, the executive chairman of Amentum, attended the wedding alongside his son, Steve Demetriou Jr., a Repubican Ohio state representative. While several news media outlets — including The New York Post’s celebrity column, Page Six, and U.K. newspaper Metro — published pictures of and quotes from Demetriou and his son, Snopes did not receive direct confirmation that they…

Anyone who imagined that reports in recent days of Iran and Oman being near an agreement on reopening the Strait of Hormuz meant that it might actually reopen, and that oil and other critical commercial traffic would soon resume, now knows better.The strait, which Iran effectively shut down in retaliation for the war launched by the United States and Israel in February, will remain closed for business, a top Iranian official said Sunday.“An agreement with Oman does not mean reopening the strait,” said the official, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.In keeping with negotiations that have progressed as fitfully as the ships…

“There is no doubt that there is concern about containing the competition from National Future,” said Marco Tarchi, a leading right-wing political scientist. “It all boils down to a sharpening of tone. The issues — security, immigration, identity — remain the same as before.”  During the electoral campaign that brought her to power in 2022, Meloni promised to crack down on illegal migration by putting in place a naval blockade off Italy’s coast. Though that project never ultimately happened, Meloni’s government did open detention hubs in Albania to house migrants while their asylum applications are processed.  Vannacci, who is campaigning…

Despite its ferocious popularity, people still tend to swear off anime entirely. These are usually the people whose reference of the medium pertains to a certain stereotype or to the few seconds of anime they once saw on a computer somewhere in the early 2000s.But Japan has been producing some of the most emotionally resonant and visually audacious storytelling in contemporary media for half a century, and a great deal of it looks nothing at all like the stereotype it holds.So here’s a case for the uninitiated. Start with self-contained films you can knock out in a single evening before…

Canary Capital’s Canary XRP ETF (XRPC) ended the first half of 2026 with $81.6 million less in net assets even after capital-share transactions added a net $82.4 million, showing how falling asset values can overwhelm growth in an exchange-traded fund.The fund’s unaudited Form 10-Q, filed Aug. 7, showed net assets declining from $322.8 million at Dec. 31, 2025, to $241.2 million at June 30, 2026.The accounting bridge is direct: capital-share transactions increased net assets by $82.36 million, but the accounting decrease from operations, primarily unrealized XRP depreciation, reduced them by $164.00 million. The difference was the $81.65 million decline in…